2004-2-11 11:44 a.m.

It's Not About The Boob

I've sat on my hands and bitten my tongue and promised myself that I would not write about that story. Unless you've been living under a rock (or under a non-rippable leather bustier cup) you know the one. The hot-air nonscandal whose name starts with "Boob" and ends in "Gate." The story that everyone's felt the need to weigh in on, from Spike Lee to Dave Grohl to Sharon Osbourne. The story that just happened to break right around the time that one of the participants (the victim of the "wardrobe malfunction", whose name I will not speak here) released a new single. Yeah, that story.

But I read a story about that story this week that made me want to cheer out loud, and that proved that Bonnie Fuller's entire career to the contrary, swimming in the shallow end of the literary pool doesn't mean that you've hit your head on the bottom, if you catch my drift.

I speak of my beloved rag Entertainment Weekly, in which the lead story this week was about That Story, and it made some cogent points about the whole flap that I hadn't really seen elsewhere. For one thing, the author of that article, Mark Harris, referred to the thing that bugged me about the entire Super Bowl, and that has always bugged me about the NFL in general: the "miasma of misogyny" that hung over the whole thing, from the dancers to the boob to the nasty, meanspirited beer ads. (Where were the morality police when that ad was shown showing how the ref got used to being screamed at -- because of his stereotyped shrew of a wife at home? Nothing that I've seen on TV has ever disparaged "the sanctity of marriage" as much as that ad, yet there hasn't been a peep from the usual chorus of scolds.) And incidentally, if you've ever felt like the women's movement hasn't gotten anywhere recently, consider that a lead article written by a man and published in a mass-market weekly entertainment magazine actually used the phrase "miasma of misogyny" in a non-ironic way. Chicken soup for the feminist soul, that is.

A couple of other points Harris raises I haven't seen even alluded to anywhere else. He doesn't discuss it in detail, but simply asks America to sit for a minute with the creepy racist imagery of "a white man ripping off a black woman's top in front of a cheering crowd." If you don't quite feel that, imagine it with the genders reversed. What if instead of playing the dimbulb majorette, Jessica Simpson had been singing that song and, say, Nelly had been on hand to rip off her clothes? You wouldn't actually see the elephant in the room with people's commentary, but you'd sure see the outline from the way people would be skirting around it.

Also, there really isn't much difference between the scantily-clad dancers on the MTV show and NFL cheerleaders other than an inch or two of fabric. Why is it that one is considered "family friendly" and the other is not, why do so many people play along with the illusion that there is a big difference, and why has it taken so long for someone in the mainstream media to point out that disconnect?

In any case, that article kicked ten kinds of ass, and I just felt compelled to share. Now can we please get on with the shallowfest that is the Oscars, and, God willing, let Billy Crystal keep the jokes about That Story to a *cough* bare minimum? Thanks, America, you're a peach.

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